Non-profit of the Week ~ Do One Good Thing

This week you may feel inundated with challenging news – I know I do. I’m concerned about my savings, the fate of our economy, soldiers and civilians getting injured and dying around the world, land mines, breast cancer, homelessness, hunger, you name it.

During this risky financial time you (and I) may be more inclined to hunker down, protect our savings, keep our jobs, money and families secure. Unfortunately non-profit organizations of all sorts will suffer as more of us give less of what we have.

My challenge to you is to do one good thing this week. It doesn’t matter if it’s giving $1 or $100 or a few minutes of your time, just do one good thing.

Here are some ideas:
• Tithe at church
• Donate clothing or items you no longer use to a service organization like AmVets (http://www.ilamvets.org/donate.cfm ) or the Brown Elephant (http://www.howardbrown.org/hb_brownelephant.asp)
• Give an extra buck for whatever organization is being supported at the pet store or the grocery
• Give food to the local food pantry (http://www.feedingillinois.org/)
• Offer to do an errand for someone in need – take them food – books – movies – you name it

I could write ideas all day. . . . but I’ll spare you.


One of my favorite quotes by Edward Abbey is this, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” Get an idea and follow through this week – you’ll preserve your soul and help out another!

It's all about Apples ~ and peeler-coorer-slicers!

When I was growing up, my mom would make fabulous homemade applesauce, apple crisp, apple muffins, apple cobbler, and baked apples. Wonderful delights! I have always loved eating apples and baking with apples - that's what happens when you are named after an apple.

Every fall my family and friends would go to Crane's Apple Orchard or Cornwell's Turkeyville USA. Later, once I'd moved away for school, I'd go to Uncle John's Cider Mill in St. John's, MI.

http://www.craneorchards.com/
http://www.turkeyville.com/
http://www.ujcidermill.com/

(one visit to these places and you'll be ready to move to Michigan!)

Baking with apples can be a lot of work and I can remember wanting an apple peeler-corer-slicer as early as 1995. My mom always supplied me with apple corers - and - frankly - they are dangerous tools.






(examples of dangerous tools - oops - this last one isn't an apple corer - although it looks equally dangerous)

After several near injuries I figured I'd head to Turkeyville, USA to get a "good" one. That one was just as dangerous as the rest.

I'm a patient person (some of the time) and I don't make snap decisions (some of the time), so I found myself in 2007 - yes, 12 years later, making the decision to purchase a Pampered Chef Apple Peeler Corer Slicer. I pulled it out yesterday so I could simply gaze at it in wonder.

I'm downright giddy about trying the thing, so . . . hold your breath and give a drum roll. . . in the next few days I anticipate there will be a different apple corer picture on my blog!

In the meantime. . . .

In the past year I've had some loss. My Dad's death and an important relationship being the two greatest. There's no good timing when you lose a parent and there are definitely relationships where a lot can be attributed to bad timing. This was one of them.

So. . . if it wasn't the right time. . . and I need to move on with life and I don't always know how based on my general feelings of sadness and loss . . . .

what do I do in the meantime?

So far my gut, a really good book (In the Meantime, Finding Yourself and the Love You Want by Iyanla Vanzant), and plenty of sadness, have led me to do the things that it would behoov me to do whether I'm in a relationship, or on my own.

~ be honest with myself and others about . . . well. . . everything
~ stay clear in my life goals and keep moving towards them
~ take time for me, for my family and friends, and for the romantic relationship in my life
~love

I'm also working on being in the moment (not stuck in memories of the past whether good or bad, or worries about the future), not thinking about what others think about me, and attempting to approach every situation from a place of love and compassion.

A long while back, my mom gave me a bookmark that had a great quote by theologian John Wesley. That quote has stuck since the day I read it.

"Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”

Perhaps a new version could read:

Be all the love you can,
Love by all the means you can,
Love in all the ways you can,
Love in all the places you can,
Love at all the times you can,
Love all the people you can,
Love as long as ever you can.

I like that version.
I'm going to try it.

Non-profit of the week - The Night Ministry

This is a great organization and there are plenty of ways to support them.

More on it later . . . check out the link!

http://www.thenightministry.org/004_about/

Hadron Super Collider says "no Big Bang this week"

On a day of remembrance and mourning, during a time of hyped-up election fervor and nationalism, it comforts me that over 8,000 scientists from around the world (mainly physicists I'm guessing) have been working together on the project below in order to find our (every person, living species, and rock) singular, unified, origin.

For anyone who missed this, it was perhaps one of the greatest physics undertakings of our time.

Yesterday in Geneva scientists began running experiments w/ the collider that could explain the existence of, well, us. Yup. How did mass get here? How did we get here? How did black holes get (or I guess since it's a hole - not get) here?

This thrills many and scares the crap out of some. I haven't figured out where I stand on the thrill vs. scared spectrum. If the Big Bang created our universe, it was a VERY big and VERY out of control deal. And the scientists who set up Hadron have created a VERY controlled environment. But. . . what if these little particles really do have more energy than we'd ever imagined? There had to be an awful lot of energy the day our universe was created.

Needless to say, check out some articles. The Big Bang didn't replicate (on a small, controlled scale) yesterday, nor were any new black holes created, and Europe wasn't blown to bits into the water.

See CNN and Wikipedia articles below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/08/lhc.collider/index.html

Non-profit of the week: PACs

Ok. Not really non-profit of the week. You may not buy that at all. But I want to remind you about PACs and their existence, and the fact that they do influence campaigns.

I'll just call it: put your money where your interest is. And I'm not going to use that lovely phrase "special interest."

PACs are fascinating things. Wikipedia has a good description:In the US, a Political Action Committee, or PAC, is the name commonly given to a private group, regardless of size, organized to elect political candidates. Legally, what constitutes a "PAC" for purposes of regulation is a matter of state and federal law. Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, an organization becomes a "political committee" by receiving contributions or making expenditures in excess of $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee (description)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_action_committees (list of PACs)

If you have a moment, take a look at the list of PACs on the link above. Chances are there's a cause on that list that you can relate to. Chances are also good that you want to elect leaders that support and promote your position for that cause. If you don't want to give directly to an individual campaign and you just want to make sure your particular interests play a part in the election, you may want to donate to one of the PACs on the list.

our potential book-banning, librarian-firing, vp

If McCain and Palin are elected in November, I'd like Governor Palin to brush up on her knowledge of 1st Amendment rights before hitting the White House.

September 3, 2008
Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
WASILLA, Alaska — The world arrived here more than a century ago with the gold rush and later the railroad. Yet one aspect of American life did not come to town until 1996, the year Sarah Palin ran for mayor and Wasilla got its first local lesson in wedge politics.
The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people — Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? — seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.
Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.
Two years after Representative Newt Gingrich helped draft the Contract With America to advance Republican positions, Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod sled dog race.
“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”
“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”
For all the admiration in Alaska for Ms. Palin, her rapid ascent from an activist in the P.T.A. to the running mate of Senator John McCain did not come without battle wounds. Her years in Wasilla, her first executive experience, reveal a mix of successes and stumbles, with Ms. Palin gaining support from a majority of residents for her drive, her faith and her accessibility but alienating others with what they said could be a polarizing single-mindedness.
“She is an aggressive reformer who isn’t afraid to break glass, to bring change to Wasilla and later to the state of Alaska,” said Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, who declined to address specific aspects of Ms. Palin’s tenure as mayor. “Washington needs some of that.”
In Wasilla, Ms. Palin is widely praised for following through on campaign promises by cutting property taxes while improving roads and sewers and strengthening the Police Department.
Her supporters say she helped Wasilla evolve from a ridiculed backwater to fast-growing suburb. The population of about 5,000 during her tenure as mayor has grown to nearly 10,000 now, and the city is filling with big box stores, including a Target that is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, one of three opening statewide that day in the chain’s Alaska debut.
But her critics say too much growth too quickly has made a mess of what not long ago was homesteaded farmland.
And for some, Ms. Palin’s first months in office here were so jarring — and so alienating — that an effort was made to force a recall. About 100 people attended a meeting to discuss the effort, which was covered in the local press, but the idea was dropped.
Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”
Ms. Emmons was not the only employee to leave. During her campaign, Ms. Palin appealed to voters who felt that city employees under Mr. Stein, who was not from Wasilla and had earned a degree in public administration at the University of Oregon, had been unresponsive and rigid regarding a new comprehensive development plan. In turn, some city employees expressed support for Mr. Stein in a campaign advertisement.
Once in office, Ms. Palin asked many of Mr. Stein’s backers to resign — something virtually unheard of in Wasilla in past elections. The public works director, city planner, museum director and others were forced out. The police chief, Irl Stambaugh, was later fired outright.
Mr. Stambaugh lost a wrongful termination lawsuit against Ms. Palin. He did not respond to a request for an interview.
Ms. Palin also upended the town’s traditional ways with a surprise edict: No employee was to talk to the news media without her permission.
“It was just things you don’t ever associate with a small town,” Victoria Naegele, then the managing editor of The Frontiersman, recalled of Ms. Palin’s first year in office. “It was like we were warped into real politics instead of just ‘Do you like Joe or Mary for the job?’ It was a strange time.”
Ms. Palin, her critics note, was not always the fiscal watchdog she has since boasted of being. In her second term as mayor, she pushed for a half-cent raise in the local sales tax to pay for a $15 million sports complex. The complex is popular and a junior league hockey team plays there now, but the city recently had to pay more than $1.3 million to settle an ownership dispute over the site.
Ms. Palin also began annual trips to Washington to lobby for federal money for specific initiatives, including rail projects and a mental health center. Her running mate, Mr. McCain, has been an outspoken critic of these so-called earmarks and as governor Ms. Palin has sounded more like him, vetoing tens of millions of dollars of local projects sought by state lawmakers.
She is largely viewed as having had her hometown’s best interests at heart when she pursued big projects or an overhaul of city taxes. By the time she ran for re-election in 1999 — again facing Mr. Stein — things had smoothed out. She was returned to office by a large margin, 826 votes to 255.
Ms. Palin, who had campaigned promising to cut her own full-time salary, reduced it from about $68,000 to about $64,000, but she also hired a city administrator, John Cramer, adding a salary to the payroll.
Critics said Republican leaders installed Mr. Cramer, who was closely tied to a powerful local state lawmaker, Lyda Green. Ms. Green, who is retiring this year as Senate president, endorsed Ms. Palin in her campaign for mayor but became one of her biggest critics when Ms. Palin was governor.
Tensions did ease eventually in Wasilla, and Mr. Cramer is given some of the credit, supporters and opponents of Ms. Palin said.
“When I first met Sarah, I would say Sarah was a Republican, with the big R, and that’s it,” said Dave Chappel, Ms. Palin’s deputy mayor for more than two years. “As she developed politically, she began to see beyond the R and look at the whole picture. She matured.”
Just as Ms. Palin terminated employees on her way into office, she also let some go on the way out, including Mr. Cramer. When Ms. Palin completed her second and final term, in 2002, her stepmother-in-law, Faye Palin, was running to succeed her. It seemed like a good idea, except that Faye Palin supported abortion rights and was registered as unaffiliated, not Republican, people who remember the race said. Sarah Palin sided instead with Dianne M. Keller, a religious conservative and an ally on the City Council. Ms. Keller won.
“That was interesting,” Mr. Chappel said. “Faye lives up the street from me. I can’t really say much about that.”
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting from Washington.

Non Profit of the Week - Chicago Books to Women Prisoners

harlequin romance, women prisoners, and me


I have a trunk filled with 2 large garbage bags of new Harlequin romance novels. Yup. And this Sunday I'm going to walk into the Chicago Books for Women Prisoners office, smile at the wonderful feminist volunteers and say, "Wow, it's so hard to part with this collection! These books have provided so many nights of bliss and entertainment!"

Ok. For those of you who know me, you are hopefully chuckling and not calling 911 with my address. Don't get me wrong, I'm not above reading a good romance novel. It's just more likely to be published by some other fine press.

I was given this lovely collection by a friend's 19-year-old daughter. She was encouraged (ok, outright ordered) by her mom to "weed" her collection, and who would be a better recipient than a librarian. There's a great organization in Chicagoland that provides books for women in prison. I've never been in prison, but I can only imagine that if there, I'd want every type of book I could get my hands on. Legal, spiritual, self-help, how to function out of prison, and last but not least, downright escapist entertainment.

If you have any paperbacks you can part with, take a look at the link below. If you can't drive to Chicago, you can certainly mail books inexpensively via media mail, or find groups in your area that donate to prisoners.

http://chicagobwp.org/about-us/